More support promised to help preschools meet demand

The Ministry of Education will increase the number of kindergartens and teachers as needed over the next few years to avoid potential shortages of preschool resources in the wake of the country's new second-child policy.

"We are keeping in contact with the National Health and Family Planning Commission and will make plans before the rainy day," said Zheng Fuzhi, director of the ministry's Basic Education Department, at a news conference on Tuesday.

According to estimates by family planning authorities, there will be more than 3 million babies born annually under the second-child policy in the next few years. By 2020, the total number of babies born under the policy will reach 17 million.

The attendance rate of preschool children in China has risen from 50.9 percent in 2009 to 70.5 percent last year, although scenes of parents standing in line day and night to get their kids admitted to a public kindergarten still make headlines in domestic newspapers from time to time.

Many couples worry that increasing numbers will put more strain on an preschool resources that are already-insufficient and make it even more difficult for parents to place their children into State-run kindergartens, which are cheaper than private ones.

To ease people's concerns, Zheng said the ministry will build more kindergartens and also provide more financial support to private ones to help lower their costs.

To be effective in meeting the challenge of more children in the system nationwide, Zheng said, the ministry cannot rely on general estimates of how many babies will be born.

"More specific calculations and estimates should be made. For example, we should know which region or even which residential community has more newly born babies before we take an action, because situations may differ in different parts of China," he said.

Yu Yongping, director-general of the China National Society of Early Childhood Education, said the strain on preschool education resources is foreseeable, and plans for building more kindergartens and developing more teachers, must be made in advance to meet the coming challenges.

For example, the current benchmark for kindergartens is one for every 15,000 people in the population, said Yu, who is also a professor of preschool education at Nanjing Normal University, noting that in the future, "with more babies coming", that might need to change.

"We should also consider whether there will be enough university graduates over the next several years to have a sufficient supply of kindergarten teachers," he said.